Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (41 page)

Chefs, food producers, and winemakers diligently mind the balance between sweet and sour. We refer to this as the
Brix-to-acid balance.
Back to the example of Welch’s grape juice and jam. The 15° Brix juice has a sour pH level of 3.35, the level appropriate for a sweet juice. It has enough tartness to make it refreshing. When Brix gets higher, as it is in the 65° Brix jam, you need more acidity to cut through the sticky sweetness. Welch’s grape jam has a pH of 2.9: much more sour than the juice (remember that lower pH equals higher sourness). Without the extra acidity, the jam would taste flat and cloying.

I love sweet white wines such as riesling, kerner, gewürtztraminer, and sylvaner, which need a specific Brix-to-acid balance. In my opinion, people who turn their nose up at sweet wine have just not tasted sweet wine with a proper Brix-to-acid balance. When the acidity is high enough to balance the sweetness in a wine, you don’t perceive it as sweet. Just delicious. The same holds true for red wines, which can also have a high Brix level without enough acidity. If there’s little bitterness, as well, these wines taste flat and flabby and can be uninteresting to drink. Getting the Brix-to-acid balance
just about right
is critical to making something that people want to keep eating or drinking.

Chefs use sweetness for a variety of purposes beyond just adding the Basic Taste sweet to their food. Pastry chefs and bread bakers use sugar as a functional ingredient when making baked goods, as it affects the way doughs rise in the oven. Sugar can also be worked into candy-like decorations, heated until it tastes like caramel, and cooked until brittle.

Good chefs know how to create complicated, nuanced flavors by using the right source of sweetness for a dish. The unique flavor of molasses comes from mineral impurities that make it is less clean than sugar. These include iron (present in beef) and copper (present in pork), which make it a natural partner to meat. On the other hand, sugar is the cleanest expression of the sweet Basic Taste: it has no impurities or micronutrients
¹⁹
that have other tastes or aromas. All you taste from sugar is sweet. Many of the high-intensity sweeteners lack the clean sweetness of sugar, and this is another reason that they simply don’t taste as right.

Cinnamon has a familiar aroma that you might describe as spicy, warm, musky, or woody. You might also describe cinnamon as sweet, although anyone who has ever gotten a mouthful of plain cinnamon knows it’s not really sweet. This confusion
between the senses is a result of associating cinnamon with breakfast pastries, cookies, cakes, and other sweet foods where cinnamon is used at very low levels. When you smell cinnamon, even in the absence of sugar, or taste it plain without anything else, you remember sweetness, which most foods with cinnamon have. The same is true of vanilla, nutmeg, and cocoa. In fact, cocoa is assertively bitter, yet due to our experience with it in sweet foods, we sometimes say cocoa smells sweet. Because of this association between certain aromas and the Basic Taste sweet, you can make something taste sweeter by upping the amount of vanilla or cinnamon in it. You’re not adding sweetness, just the perception of it.

When sugar is heated to a high enough temperature it starts to melt, then undergoes a startling transformation. The transformation of granular white crystals to golden brown syrup is one of the most satisfying types of alchemy a chef can perform. Caramel is browned sugar. To caramelize something else, then, is to brown the naturally occurring sugar in that food. For example, you can bring out the natural sugars in an onion by slowly cooking it until the sugars brown. Other wonderful things happen when you cook sugars. Lovely nutty, roasty aromas develop. Maillard browning is created when sugars are heated in the presence of amino acids and browning itself creates hundreds of flavorful compounds, many of which are some of the most desirable flavors known to man—browned meat, baked bread, and roasted coffee.

The taste of sugar helps relieve pain. Doctors all over the world employ the sweet taste to mitigate pain from many medical procedures, from taking blood to circumcising baby boys, who will cry less and show less distress if they have
a sweet taste in their mouth during the surgery. This is such a well-known phenomenon that Western parents used to give babies sugar water to soothe them and some parents in less developed countries still do. The downside to using sweetness as a pain reliever for kids is that babies who are given sugar water early in life like sweetness more when they are older and sometimes grow up to eat more sweets, get more cavities, and become overweight.

On average, kids like sweeter things than adults do. When you mature, you lose your love for exorbitantly sweet candies, gums, and drinks, although some people still love the supersweet stuff they did as kids. It’s likely that these sweets lovers aren’t drinkers, because the amount of alcohol you drink and how much sugar you eat are inversely correlated. There is a belief that the sensory satisfaction from alcoholic beverages scratches the same itch that sugar does. The more you drink, the less likely you are to eat candies, cookies, and cakes. But if you quit drinking, you’ll start to crave these sweet things. Clearly, drinking alcohol and eating sweets are both pleasurable activities, but whether they work the same way in the brain is unclear. It’s no coincidence that sugar consumption skyrocketed in the United States following the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. The US Federal Trade Commission’s
Report on Sugar Supply and Prices
stated “prohibition is one of the causes of the greatly increased number of candy stores, ice cream establishments, and soft-drink manufacturers.” The temperance movement aimed to reduce crime and domestic violence, but it ended up causing an unintended consequence: encouraging America’s consumption of the Basic Taste sweet.

YOU WILL NEED

1 quart room-temperature water (8 ounces water in each cup or bowl), plus more for cleansing your palate

4 cups or bowls

1 packet Equal

1 packet Splenda

1 packet Truvia

2 tablespoons sugar

Saltine crackers and water for cleansing your palate

Paper and pens or pencils

DIRECTIONS

1. Pour the water equally into the cups. Dissolve the sweeteners into separate cups of water, one at a time. It will take a bit longer to dissolve the sugar. Make sure it’s all dissolved before starting the exercise. All of the other sweeteners will go into solution much more easily.

2. Taste these sweetened waters, considering the following things:

• Notice how quickly you detect the sweetness

• Count how long it takes for the sweetness to fill your entire mouth.

• Notice how full the sweetness is in your mouth.

• Count how long the sweetness lasts.

• Write down any other flavors you taste.

3. Taste the sugar water. After the sweetness is gone, eat a cracker and drink some plain water to cleanse your palate. Write down your reactions.

4. Repeat for the Equal water.

5. Repeat for the Truvia water.

6. Repeat for the Splenda water.

OBSERVE

• Remember that the only Basic Taste you are experiencing in each of these samples is sweet.

• Why do they
taste
so different?

• It’s because each one of them has a different sweetness curve. Review the Sweetness Profile graph. Does this make more sense to you now?

YOU WILL NEED

Coca-cola or Pepsi

Orange juice

Gatorade, any flavor

Frappuccino bottled coffee beverage

Milk, 2%

Brewed coffee, black Cups for everyone who is tasting

Pens and paper for tasters to write down their answers Saltine crackers for cleansing your palate.